Comparison of element technologies for modeling stent expansion.

Numerical analysis has become a standard, and in fact required, component of the process in which new biomedical stent devices are designed and approved. Despite this, very little work has been performed comparing the efficiency of various numerical techniques currently available to the analyst. The present paper begins this study by comparing the computational efficiency and results achieved using various element technologies in the context of stent deployment simulations. The findings indicate that the methodologies most commonly adopted in the present literature/industrial practice are in many cases less than optimal with regard to computational efficiency.